Business

The answer to why Africa is poor is simply that its leaders have made this choice, argues Greg Mills in Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do About It (published in 2011 by Penguin). The Big Man mentality that is ubiquitous all over the continent has done Africa’s development a lot of harm. Aid, on the other hand, has proven to have the opposite of its desired effect in the continent – it has helped us move backwards rather than catapult us forward into the league of other nations of the world.

Ayitteh offers a way out for Africa to get rid of its ‘leaky begging bowl’ by advocating a return to the indigenous economic systems castigated before by the elites as backward and primitive. He argues that Africa’s indigenous systems have a long history of free trade and free markets that can be harnessed along with increased investment, both foreign and domestic.

Moyo shot to international prominence with her first book, Dead Aid, which was published in 2009 by Penguin. Two points can be made from the book – one, Aid is not working for Africa and two, there is another way apart from aid. This way is what Moyo calls the Dead Aid proposal.

In Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs, Makura profiles businessmen from across the Mother Continent and brings snippets of her interviewees’ lives into print that could easily have remained hidden with the sound bytes on camera. This is broadcast journalism hoisted onto its print cousin.

Edited by Florence Kuteesa, Emanuel Tumusiime Mutebile, Alan Whitworth, and Tim Williamson, Uganda’s Economic Reforms; Insider Accounts is a compilation of 16 papers written by “insiders” – the men and women, who were architects and implementers of Uganda’s reforms in the period after 1986.

Finding public sector success stories in Africa is rare, which explains why many African governments have resorted to full scale privatization. Against this context, the story of Dr. William Muhairwe, and how he turned around a failing government parastatal offers a real-world window into what really ails Africa.